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Review 12/16/2009
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I am writing about our experience with IMARKETERS.NET also known as USAPARIS.COM. In August, 2009, we arranged to rent an apartment in Paris from them for six night's stay November 22 - 28, 2009. We signed a lease, and our credit card was charged for the full amount ($1787.00) in August.
A week before our trip, our husband began calling, without luck, to get information about how to gain access to the apartment. On Friday, November 20, day before we were to fly to Paris, the company finally told us that they had never been able to get the owner of the apartment to sign our lease, and that the apartment was not available.
They offered us another apartment that was not comparable in location or in furnishings; we declined and reserved a room in a hotel. It is impossible to imagine a worse way to begin a trip that we had planned for six months.
To date, efforts to get a refund have been unsuccessful. I called on 12/14 and had a very unsatisfactory conversation, at which point they said that they would mail a check on 12/23. I called AMEX and disputed our charges. Later that day, I received an email indicating that USAPARIS.COM had scheduled a check from Bank of America to be mailed on 12/17. At this point, unwilling to trust that the company would/could actually refund our money, I decided to leave my AMEX dispute in place until a check arrived and cleared.
USAPARIS emailed and said that, because I had disputed the charge with AMEX, they had stopped payment. At this point, we are at an impasse.
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Business's response - by Peter v.on 3/3/2010
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This is the present situation :
You have been refunded twice,
- once by means of the chargeback that you initiated while the refund check was in the mail and about to be delivered,
and
- a second time after you cashed the second check that we sent you, after you had agreed to drop the chargeback case.
See below your explanations, as per email that you sent us on Feb 7th, 2010.
Under these circumstances, is the review posted here really appropriate ?
Indeed, it is questionning our integrity by stating the opinion that you are likely not to get refunded.
On the contrary, after having been refunded twice, almost once month later, we are still waiting for you to correct this situation.
Also, when stating that the substitute apartment, rue Dauphine, is in a different area than the one you had chosen, rue Furstenberg, anyone can see on a map of Paris that these streets are almost adjacent to each other, in the exact same area.
Your frustration here is understandable, but again, we need to stress out that a vacation rental property is different than a hotel, and it do happen to be technically unavailable at times, just like any other property. In that situation, we always offer an alternative or a refund. Your wife did not like the alternative, a 2 million dollar property located just steps away, with outstanding feedbacks, opted for a refund, and decided to stay at a hotel instead.
This is what you emailed us:
On 2/7/2010 3:34 PM, Mr W... wrote:
Mr. Van der Vliet,
I discussed this with an account representative at American Express again tomorrow. He stated that it took action on February 4 to make the charge to our account final and to credit your bank again for the charge.
(...) Comment of UsaParis : We haven't seen that money yet on our account, one month later ?
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